How to speak Neanderthal: Perhaps we do already

By Sean Roberts, Dan Dediu and Scott Moisik

We know our ancestors cosied up to our Neanderthal cousins, but did their liaisons leave an imprint on today’s languages?

IF YOU find yourself stuttering your way through tourist French, spare a thought for the first modern humans. Travelling from Africa to Asia and Europe about 70,000 years ago, they would have encountered their evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, for the first time.

What did they say? In the past, many would have answered “not a lot” since Neanderthals weren’t thought to have complex speech. But recent evidence suggests they probably had languages very similar to our own. Surprisingly, we may now have the means to glimpse those utterances in the words we speak today, with huge consequences for our understanding of language evolution.

The argument that Neanderthals spoke like us comes from many discoveries. Archaeological remains show that they had a sophisticated lifestyle, with human traits like caring for the infirm and the sick, and an advanced toolkit, including bone tools and body paint – complex behaviour that should only be possible if they had language. We also have some more direct anatomical evidence&colon; traces of nerve pathways through bones in the skull suggest Neanderthals could control their vocalisations, for instance – an adaptation necessary for language that other apes lack. It also looks as if Neanderthals had many gene variants associated with processing language.

So it seems reasonable to assume that their speech would have been similar to our own, with the differences either being down to their vocal anatomy, the way their brains were wired, or simply cultural evolution around the time they diverged from modern humans. The ...

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